3. It will result in an abundance of niche products. Consumers will benefit from this choice, even if there’ll be too much of it!

4. Prices of mid-to-low end manufacturing goods could well come down. They did for newspapers, so why not physical goods?

5. Manufacturing supply chains will see substantial changes. Small producers will want small batches. They’ll also prefer not to hold inventory i.e. manufacturing on demand. And they’ll obviously want to reduce costs, such as transportation.

In a series of later blog posts we will look at what this means for China’s outsourcing growth model, and how 3D printing might also affect other developing economies.

And we will look at how petrochemical producers – those that can be bothered to think beyond the next set of quarterly results – should respond.